Another of those ever popular fantasy stories are borough to the big screen. The premise is the most exciting thing here. In this one the villains comes from a fantasy book into the real world to face the protagonists, and not the other way around. Its a neat idea. But as the story unfolds, Inkheart quickly turns into a substandard search and find adventure.<br /><br />To work this film definitely needed better characters or a better story. Dustfinger was the only character with any considerable development, but even so, i was ambivalent about him. The part where he decides NOT to tell Mo about his wife being in the castle worked in context of his character, to a degree, but it also felt like a convenient excuse to take the story down a detour, witch could have been forgivable, if this detour was interesting to begin with.<br /><br />The dad and his daughter work because they are archetypes and protagonists. But there is nothing noteworthy about them, acting or scriptwise.<br /><br />The worst character is Farid. I haven seen a character come so totally out of the blue and then tag along for no apparent reason sense Jar Jar Binks crashed into Starwars, and Farid is almost as annoying. There are some hamfisted attempts at humour sorroung his character that really annoyed me.<br /><br />The book hugging grandmother that decides to storm a castle with her bike also falls under the annoying category.<br /><br />As for the authour? Lets not even go there.<br /><br />If you're into this genre (like me) you might as well satisfy your curiosity and watch it, the film is colorful and features some beautiful locations and the effects are generally good. The camera-work stands out throughout the film. Nice framing and who ever handles it knows how to more around with it at the right places too.<br /><br />The ending sort of pulls a rabbit out of a hat though.